Cover of ‘Reliability of InSAR satellite monitoring of buildings near inner city quay walls’, with a canal cityscape demonstrating structural risk assessment in dense urban areas.

Reliability of InSAR satellite monitoring of buildings near inner city quay walls

Technical Paper

This paper assesses the reliability of using Permanent Scatterer Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PS-InSAR) satellite measurements to determine the vertical deformation rate of buildings adjacent to Amsterdam's historic quay walls. The deformation rate is a key indicator for potential foundation problems, especially before quay wall replacement.

 

  • Learn how Permanent Scatterer InSAR (PS-InSAR) reduces the required monitoring period for foundation assessment from two years using traditional levelling to just a few months.

  • Understand the statistical procedure applied to both InSAR and levelling data to rigorously verify their reliability and accurately determine the vertical deformation rate of buildings.

  • Discover that a locally optimized InSAR dataset achieved 100% reliable data point coverage for every building in the Amsterdam inner-city case studies.

  • See how the InSAR-derived vertical deformation rates show good agreement with traditional levelling measurements in two of the three Amsterdam case studies.

  • Grasp that InSAR provides a much more robust and reliable estimate of the deformation rate compared to levelling, due to the significantly larger number of measurements in the time series.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Municipal asset managers, foundation engineers and quay wall renewal teams in historic cities.

  • Whether PS-InSAR can reliably measure how fast buildings next to Amsterdam’s historic quay walls are moving vertically, an early sign of foundation problems.

  • InSAR gives a more robust rate because it has far more measurements, and it can cut the monitoring period from about two years to a few months.